This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jez Humble about his Agile 2017 Keynote talk in which he refuted many of the common excuses why “continuous delivery won’t work here”. He also gave a scathing response to the “Manifestbro” controversy which recently unfolded at Google.

Key Takeaways

Key takeaways about DevOps:

There are many reasons cited for not adopting DevOps – the real reasons are cultural and architectural issues

It takes commitment and effort at every level to rearchitect not just the products but the organisation to support the new ways of working

Even if you are not deploying every day, the practices of DevOps deliver huge dividends around reducing development costs, improving quality and maintainability and driving shorter lead

It’s not about repeating what someone else has done, it’s the ability to make mistakes and learn from them which makes teams and organisations successful

Key takeaways on the gender diversity challenge:

In 2017 we should have come beyond the need to address these issues but the state of the industry means we must

There is extensive research that shows the differences are tiny between the genders, and this cannot explain the vast disparity in representation in the industry by women and people of colour

The harm done by perpetuating the myths around gender differences

We all have a duty to create an inclusive environment

Examine your organisation’s systems, policies and practices for the visible elements of discrimination and fix them – check salaries and career advancement by role and if there is a gender or race difference in the rates of pay or advancement then fix them

Introducing Inclusive Collaboration and calling for participation and having the conversations about the many aspects of diversity in the workplace today

1:47 First address the team design – create empowered teams with the ability and skills who are able to design, build, run, test and experiment (with real users) with their service without needing to get authorizations and hand-offs with other teams

2:05 Enable the teams to independently deploy the product or service without needing to go through a “big bang” deployment process

2:19 The need to be able to perform deployment during normal business hours without downtime

2:27 Being able to do these things is the biggest factor in DevOps likely success

2:45 Getting to the state where these things are possible is hard and takes time, move towards it incrementally

24:20 Examine your organisation’s systems, policies and practices for the visible elements of discrimination and fix them – check salaries by role and if there is a gender or race difference in the rates of pay then fix them

24:35 Women leave the IT workforce in half the time they do in other fields – not to leave the workforce but to leave the industry which discriminates against them

25:05 Insight is the new market differentiator and diverse teams gain better insight into their customers than monocultural teams

26:45 Introducing Inclusive Collaboration and calling for participation and having the conversations about the many aspects of diversity in the workplace today

27:35 The value of having these conversations from a standpoint of understanding and mutual respect

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